Review, Week 12, 2011

Posted on March 27, 2011

This is the first installment in what I hope will be a long series of weekly reviews of the last 7 days as seen from my corner of the universe. Both as a diary for myself to keep me on track for my goals, and for anyone who cares following for whatever reason.

I did consider writing in Danish, but decided against. It somehow seems unnatural for me; I’ve gotten completely used to my online life being conducted mostly in english, broken as it might be at times.

Training

Three swims and three runs, 7300 m and 19.54 km respectively. OK, for a week on call, because when I am on call I can’t go too far from home, lest I take too long to respond. And that makes it kind of boring to go for a longer run, and impossible to go for a ride outside, so I’m bound to the turbo trainer if I want to ride.

Swimming is kind of OK when on call, I just check the phone between sets, or once in the middle of the set if it’s a long one. Like wednesdays mental break-through set of 10×200, where I for the first time managed to hang on. The programme allowed use of pull-bouy and paddles for the last 5, and I used that to full effect to hang on. Also first time in a year I’ve used paddles. I swam well, doing 1’50”-1’55”/100 m pace (50 m pool) for the total of 2000 m. And I hit 3000 m in one go too.

I haven’t managed getting around to bike training this week, I meant to do at least a session on the week-end, but servers going down and needing hands-on work to get well again completely sabotaged that. I do not function well on less than 2 hours sleep. Not even after a 2 hour 45 minute nap.

Still debating with myself whether I should go for Challenge Århus or not. I probably should. Then Silkeborg Triathlon in late August to finish the season. Both races are half-ironman races, and I’d do a few shorter races in between too.

Personal

I’m talking more and more to the various people in the triathlon club, which is great. It’s always nice to hang out with people afflicted with a similar madness as one’s own.

I’ve been swimming with them since January, yet one of the guys asked what my name was last monday, saying that I didn’t talk much so it was hard learning my name. And he’s perfectly right. I can’t remember very many of their names either. Even when I try and be social I’m just not very good at it. So I worked hard at that the rest of the week.

One thing that makes it hard is that I abslutely need to use earplugs when I swim, if not I get seasick or whatever it is that makes me dizzy and nauseous, and it makes it hard for me to hear what’s being said in the pool. I feel a little stupid because of that sometimes.

Work

It has been an oddly defocused and not very effective week, but I’ve had the honour of being on call, and I always feel distracted by that. And it really doesn’t matter very much how many SMS’es and calls there is, it’s the knowledge that at any random time I’ll have to drop whtever I’m doing and start working until done.

Sunday I had an alarm at 03:11 from a customer server that had just disappeared, completely unresponsive. Add to that that Windows 7 SP1 had made my workstation not wake up when I tried contacting it over RDP, I was very frustrated before I even got as far as to going to the server room and fix it. I got no more sleep that night.

It’s the part of the job as systemadministrator I would most like to get rid of, the rest is perfectly cool.